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I Want to Talk About My Son Brooks
“When your newborn child is going to pass away, there are all sorts of questions that you need to ask. Questions you’ve never thought about before, and never figured you’d ever need to be asking. There are a bunch of them. And they’re all terrible.” Children in hospice aren’t common, this is one story of how a parent dealth with this heart-wrenching time. I Want to Talk About My Son Brooks A movingly written essay by the Los Angeles Dodger Rich Hill tells story of their second born son Brooks. Born with a rare genetic disorder, Brooks spent a lot of time in the hospital just trying to figure out what was happening.…
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Alzheimer’s and Personal Care Choices
For those of us with Alzheimer’s, making our needs and desires known becomes increasingly more difficult as the illness progresses. With Alzheimers personal care choices and needs will change over time. Making our personal care choices known while we are still able to understand their meaning can reduce stress and improve our quality of life as we ease into later years. Advanced dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, is the sixth leading cause of death overall in the United States. It is the fifth leading cause for people over 65, and the third for those over 85. Yet once the disease approaches its terminal stages, patients are unable to communicate their desires for or against…
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Find the Best Care for Your Loved One with Hospice Compare
Medicare recently launched a new site to help us find the best care for our loved ones with Hospice Compare. It’s a website aimed at helping us find the best care by sifting through the marketing pitches of the 30-40 hospices serving our area. How do families rate their experience of care? Once on the site, put in the zip code you’re looking for help in (say 77706 or 75951 ), and you’ll be presented with all the Medicare hospices that are licensed to serve that area. When you click on their name, you’ll get two sets of information: The top section is information from the Hospice Family satisfaction surveys sent out to…
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What Does Dying Feel Like?
What does dying feel like? Science is Just Beginning to Understand the Experience of Life’s End. “Do you want to know what will happen as your body starts shutting down?” My mother and I sat across from the hospice nurse in my parents’ Colorado home. It was 2005, and my mother had reached the end of treatments for metastatic breast cancer. A month or two earlier, she’d been able to take the dog for daily walks in the mountains and travel to Australia with my father. Now, she was weak, exhausted from the disease and chemotherapy and pain medication. My mother had been the one to decide, with her doctor’s blessing, to stop…
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Thank You For Your Service
At Compassion Hospice, we honor all veterans – I had the extreme honor of meeting one of our local Army Veterans of the Vietnam War just this afternoon and saying thank you for your service . Times have changed, they didn’t come home with the respect and gratitude we try to show today. Below is a moving video from the people at moments.org. The Vietnam War marked a time of social unrest that divided our nation like never before. Service members returning home with physical and emotional scars were greeted with an unprecedented level of disrespect and dishonor. The courage and sacrifice of our veterans cannot be overstated. When you encounter them, thank…
More Moments, Made Possible
